Wrath of Marit Lage
A color-hosing enchantment from the era when sets shipped wide, asymmetric hate built right into the main game. The design speaks to a specific period of Magic's history: enchantments that pick a single enemy color and shut it off, the way Karma punished swamps or Lifeforce policed black. This one locks red creatures down hard, tapping them on entry and denying their untap step indefinitely, a soft prison rather than removal. The trouble is that the constraint cuts both ways. It does nothing against red's burn, nothing against artifact creatures splashed into a red deck, and nothing the turn an opponent simply has no red creatures on board. As a five-mana enchantment that answers only one slice of one color, it carries the structural awkwardness of all narrow hosers from this design school: enormous against the exact deck it names, dead weight against everything else. What gives it a longer shelf life than its rate suggests is the flavor frame. Marit Lage is the buried horror at the center of the Ice Age block's mythology, the entity Lim-Dul's cultists labored to free, and a handful of effects across the block invoke her by name. The mechanics are a footnote to that worldbuilding; the card matters more as a piece of the block's story than as a tool anyone reaches for.
